Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Turns out I HAVE a blog!

As you can see, I didn't get much use out of this account during the previous year. Well, Here I am again. I've been asked to set up a blog for SoC 2008, and this will do. I'd like to start the summer off with a brief discussion of the challenges that lay ahead for my SoC coding.

Bleeding Edge GstreamerThe video editor relies on up-to-date gstreamer and gnonlin, sometimes even SVN. Installing these from source is kindof a pain. I tried installing gentoo in a chroot, and using this to build recent gstreamer. This is a great option on my thinkpad, but not so great on my eeePc, which I will be using in europe this summer. So, step one is to get both of my development machines ready to go with bleeding edge gstreamer libraries.

Limitations with Goocanvas

I have been tinkering with goocanvas for a couple of months now. I think it is a very useful library, but there are a couple of issues with it in its current form.

Goocanvas doesn't give a lot of help with interaction. There is a "container" class called Table, but this going to help me implement a re-orderable list for the simple timeline. Aside from the fact that goocanvas is based on gobject, there isn't much support for dynamically resizing and repositioning objects. I need to build up dynamic containers first, and then make the individual container items reorderable.

There is no consistent property interface between the stock canvas items. The majority support x, y, width, and height. But a few do not, namely Text, Circle, Polyline, and Path. Fortunately, I will only be using the Text object, so I think I can safely assume that all the widgets involved support those properties.Relationship with Advanced Timeline

The simple timeline is both a simplification and an abstraction of the core objects. The advanced timeline maintains a closer mapping between PiTiVi core and the user interface features. This means that many things which can be done in the advanced timeline will not be visible in the simple timeline. So what happens if the user makes a change in the advanced timeline, then switches back to the simple timeline, and makes a change there? Will some data be lost in the translation? Should the simple timeline attempt to keep track of changes to the advanced view and prevent them from being lost?

The two main issues I can see are: 1) in the advaned view, sources may overlap each other 2) in the advanced view, source and effect properties will vary over time

Both of these can't be represented in the simple view. So what happens if you spend an hour carefully tuning volume settings in the advanced view, then switch to the simple view and move the volume slider? Does it amplify the whole curve? Does it flatten the curve? Do we even allow the volume slider to move after changing settings in the advanced view?